Supper Club Planning and Two Southern Cookbooks

One of the things I really want to do this year is start a rotating supper club with some friends. I'd love to have a steady recurring themed evening of food and friendship. I've already roped one other family in on the fun, and would like to find a third. I think it would be interesting to pick a theme or a cookbook or a famous chef and use them as inspiration. I imagine an Italian night, a meal out of A Homemade Life, and riffing off the Chopped judges. I also imagine doing a full Southern meal for my decidedly Yankee friends. In addition to picking a few family favorites, I have two cookbooks from NetGalley that will help me find just the right dishes.

First is Besh Big Easy: 101 Home Cooked New Orleans Recipes. I love love love the blues and New Orleans, and I can't stop myself from requesting every book (fiction and non-fiction) set in New Orleans that I see, but I didn't think this through really well, as the majority of the recipes are, of course, seafood.  I am not a huge seafood fan and even if I were I live in South Dakota-- as far from the sea as you can get. That said, I did find a handful of potential candidates in the book, and the writing and reading is quite lovely, as is the photography.  I've bookmarked Bananas Foster, Mamma's Bread Pudding with Hot Buttered Rum Sauce, Sweet Corn Macque Choux, and Baked Cheesy Grits as potential dinner recipes. Besh Big Easy is released on September 29th.

The second book that I've requested is Nashville Eats: Hot Chicken, Buttermilk Biscuits, and 100 More Southern Recipes from Music City.  Mike and I love Nashville, and really Tennessee as a whole. When we first were together we visited Memphis several times, and I have family in Murfreesboro so this is right up our alley. Chess Pie is definitely on our list of recipes for Southern night and I was thrilled to see a recipe for that included (tho I do have a similar family version.) Nashville Eats is more than just recipes, it also includes beautiful descriptions of Nashville itself and the musical history. This one is a book you can just sit and read, much like A Homemade Life. If I had any complaint it would be that the Kindle formatting is awkward, but there's always the paper version to get around that problem. Nashville Eats will be released on October 6th.

I am really excited to get the Supper Club going and can't wait to kick it off with a meal from home.

Midnight Bayou by Nora Roberts

It seems that lately whenever I'm feeling a bit aimless about my reading, that I reach for a contemporary romance novel by a tried and true author. One that I know will a) have a happy ending and b) compell me to read it almost straight through. There is a certain type of romance that fits this slot nicely for me, typically they are full length novels that revolve around a town or a family, and are often part of a series. Examples of this feel-good, quick read, series that I've loved include:

• Nora Roberts' MacKade brothers
• Nora Roberts' Cheasepeake Bay brothers
• Susan Mallery's Fool's Gold Series
• Many of Nora Roberts' stand alones
• Robyn Carr's Virgin River series (even though I have some quibbles with them.)

So despite having quite the haul of library books, and the entire Black Dagger Brotherhood series on stand-by, I picked up Midnight Bayou.  Midnight Bayou has been on my TBR shelves for years. I'm pretty sure I got it from Paperbackswap and it's managed to stay on the shelves through the moves and the purging. Due to Ms. Roberts incredible success, her paperbacks often have tons of blurbs, and a glossy full length picture of the author, but no easy to locate plot summary. So I knew it was a romance, and I knew it took place in or near New Orleans, and I knew I could expect some paranormal activity. I'm a huge sucker for a New Orleans/ Cajun / Bluesy setting (In the Midnight Rain by Ruth Wind being an all time favorite book, not just romance!) so I dived in.

Midnight Bayou is a standalone romance (I wonder if Remy and Effie might have their own book, but have been too lazy to figure out). Our hero, Declan, has purchased a large plantation in a state of disrepair and has moved from Boston to restore it. Lena is a descendent of the house, and is now a moderately successful bar owner. Dec is down right perfect. Seriously, no flaws. None. And is rich. Lena isn't perfect, she's pretty cynical and distrustful of love, and it takes her a while to come around. I love that the conflict is never about how they feel about each other, or how much they trust each other. There is no big misunderstanding. In fact, there's very little conflict at all, except with the ghosts, and I liked that.

Here's the thing though, while Midnight Bayou hit the spot exactly, I didn't really love it. It did have quite a few flaws- the paranormal aspect is heavy heavy. Really heavy.  If you don't want a story with ghosts, skip this. Unlike Roberts' new Boonsboro Inn series, the ghosts are very very prominent.  Additionally, it seems that Roberts has recycled Lena's mom Lilibeth into Mac's mom in Vision in White. In both cases, I think the new versions are better, but overall I hate that I noticed at all. And last, the book ends very abruptly. I read it in two long sittings, but for several hours after I finished I kept having that feeling that I was at the very end of a book and needed to see how it ended. It was annoying.

In the end, typical Roberts, I'm glad I read it, but not a favorite.

1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose

One of the books that I read while on maternity leave was 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose. As you can probably tell by the title, this was about Hurricane Katrina. Rose is an award-winning writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and chronicled the aftermath of the hurricane in it's pages. This book is a collection of his columns spanning the next 18 months or so. He addresses the death, the smell, the expectations, the mayor, the New Orleans Saints, Mardi Gras and, near the end, depression and PTSD, and everything else.

I feel odd saying this was a great book. It seems a little cruel to enjoy a book about such a tragedy. However, it's a very readable book. Since it began life as a series of newspaper columns, it's written in a very conversational way. You can imagine Rose sitting there and telling you these things over coffee. Rose is very open about his own life and how he was directly impacted. His family evacuated and his house was not lost and he doesn't pretend otherwise. He does, however, take you on a tour of the areas that were devastated.

Rose addresses the topic of how people can go on over and over. Why have Mardi Gras? Why celebrate the return of the N.O. Saints? Why spend money to rehabilitate small businesses instead of building homes and streets? All of these things are directly tied to the morale of the city. New Orleans is a city people love. It has a personality and a character all it's own and those who live there are invested in recovering that feeling. At times it seems an uphill battle and near the very end of the book Rose includes this editorial about his depression following the hurricane. I found this particular one, and the one that immediately followed it in the book to be very powerful. I highly recommend that anyone who loves New Orleans pick this one up.

This is the second book I've read about New Orleans post- Katrina lately. The first was fiction (The Tin Roof Blowdown) and this is non-fiction. I have a soft spot in my heart for Anne Rice's The Witching Hour. Does anyone have any suggestions for other New Orleans flavored reading, fiction or non-fiction?

Review also posted at We'd Rather Read.